Re: [PATCH] Improved hint on how to set identity

On Aug 14, 2007, at 1:36 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Steffen Prohaska [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I watched someone setting up git, who never used it before.
The hint was leading him into the wrong direction.

Real-life new user experience is a very valuable one.  Can you
elaborate how the hint led in a _wrong_ direction?  What is the
definition of "wrong" here?  It may be that not using --global
is perfectly the correct thing to do.  It really depends on the
project and the situation.

"wrong" == "more complex", "doing work twice",
            "solving a special case instead of the common case"

The condition to cause this error message to be shown is
probably a borderline, compared to the earlier "introductory
part of the manual" case.  You may have set an identity in one
repository without global, and then switched to another
repository and saw this message.  In which case you may want to
use a different identity or the same one and I would not say
which one is more common in the case for such a "second
repository".  When you work on two projects, managed by two
different organizations, it often is that you would want
per-repository identity.

maybe... but my feeling is that the majority of people has only
a single identity. Having multiple identities is, in my opinion,
advanced usage, and should be mentioned after the common case.

Would the majority of users want to set up a global identity
or a per repository identity?

Whatever the majority typically needs should be mentioned first.

Was this the first repository for this person to set up?

It was the first commit.


It would even be a good idea to remove the gecos auto detection
and force _everyone_ to explicitly set the identity on the first
commit. git may derive something from gecos, but often it is
not the correct identity.

I remember when I started, I didn't immediately recognize that
I need to set my identity (or how to do it). Therefore I ended
up with different identities on different machines, because the
information derived from gecos varied. And there's still a
chance that this will happen again. The situation is quite bad,
because it is very hard, if not impossible, to solve later,
after your identity was use to build some history, which may
even have been pushed to the public.

	Steffen